Saturday already

Hello dear friends.  I'm so very sorry to keep you, my half-million followers, waiting for the next episode of Extraordinarly Everyday.  Please accept my sincere apologies.

First, I give you some pictures from one of our recent outings to Indianola.  Indianola is a small town about five minutes away, with a great long pier and a rocky beach, each rock begging for an Ifland child's hand to hurl it into the water.  The Ifland children are more than willing to oblige, and so we pass our time choosing the perfect rocks, launching them through the air and waiting for the satisfying 'plunk.'

Things continue to roll along in a somewhat elliptical fashion, and while sometimes the days seem long, the truth is that the past month has held enough eventful change to last this (half-)Mennonite girl a good, long while (has it really only been a month?).  We are in the process of buying a house over in Seattle, and are thrilled with the prospects and promises it holds.  We are so thankful for the help of family during this geographic limbo, help which has made this necessarily awkward transition a little less awkward.  It is impossible to imagine how much harder this month would have been without their help (and their washing machine).  We have endured long, long hours of The Husband working late into the night (to make up for all the daytime work hours missed due to the logistics of setting up insurance and an American mortage and banking and new driver's licenses and and and...).

I am sitting next to Orion now, he in the gray rocker and me in the blue rocker, each of us with a laptop resting on our knees.  He is working; I've been looking at pictures of friends in Winnipeg.  You.  I miss you deeply.

*sigh

We're okay; just a little tired.  Orion gave me the beautiful gift of a morning in Bloedel Reserve all by myself, and it was the perfect gift.  I walked through the trees and rhododendrons, I listened, I looked, and I sat by a quiet pond and wrote a few lines of (mediocre) poetry.

dragonflies dancing over the water

the water lies still, gently shimmering with the ripples of quietly pulsing life

countless shades of green

breathtaking in the light and shadows

water reflecting the growth encircling it

light shimmering on the water reflected in translucent leaves hanging above it

it sings His glory

I am learning to worship in the everyday, with the rough stones that I have on hand, not waiting for the ever-elusive right moment.  In the midst of the uncertainty, in the midst of trying to plan another meal in a kitchen kindly stocked with utensils which are not my own, in the midst of the incessant "MOMMY MOMMY MOMMY MOMMY!," I can choose to give thanks.  I can choose to worship.

Let us remember that the life in which we ought to be interested is "daily" life.  We can, each of us, only call the present time our own....Our Lord tells us to pray for today, and so he prevents us from tormenting ourselves about tomorrow.  It is as if [God] were to say to us: "[It is I] who gives you this day [and] will also give you what you need for this day.  [It is I] who makes the sun to rise.  [It is I] who scatters the darkness of night and reveals to you the rays of the sun." 

-Gregory of Nyssa,

On the Lord's Prayer

Art & Motherhood

I read this the other day and it struck a pretty loud chord inside of me, loudly enough to make me wish I had written it.  Of course the tantrum part didn't resonate, because I'm waaay beyond that, but the rest of it about the messiness of motherhood and art is really good.

So in that vein, I'm too tired to write a proper post tonight, but I need to keep showing up; I need to keep up this blog so that it becomes a habit in my life.  I like how thoughts of this blog bump around in my head and remind me to look at the everyday with meaning-seeking lenses.  Here are some pictures of life around here.  If each of these is worth a thousand words, I figure I've done my work for tonight.

My children always smile and giggle and play together joyfully.  They never fight.  They never throw tantrums, and they certainly never bite each other hard enough to leave teeth marks. *cough*Annalyn*cough*

Brilliant Husband came up with the idea to name our transitional time, in our transitional house, Camp Ifland.  It has helped all of us.  What is camp? the children ask.  Well, camp is:

• a place away from home
• a place you stay for a while
• a place in the forest
• a place with routine
• a place where you can have adventures and make crafts and play music
• a place of growth

Looking out from Kingston across Puget Sound.  Seattle skyline with Mt. Rainier in the background.

My almost-two-year-old sweetie who never tantrums, never bites her brother hard enough to leave a mark for several days, and is exceptionally rational.  Ha. She makes my days better, though.

Seth and I never tire of foraging for berries here at Camp Ifland.  The blackberry season is just about to explode, and my mouth waters with the thought of all the delicious pies I *am* going to make.

He makes beautiful things, He makes things beautiful

Fragmented thoughts have been percolating for weeks between the packing and the re-orienting and the upheaval and the settling and the never-ending stream of The Urgent.  No time, no ability to process or think coherently or pray deeply.  Just fragments.  But here are a few of the boulders that have been forming my fragments.

1. An e-magazine I follow featured a series of women writing love letters to their bodies.  It sounded foreign to me, as I had no healthy frame of reference for this concept, and was sort of shelving it with a label such as New Age or Selfish or Vain or, well, Fleshly.  However, I started reading what women were writing.  There were stories of abuse and pain, stories of healing and redemption.  There were stories that spoke of the disconnect many women had felt between their intellect and their bodies, and how they had not seen God's good creation, given to them in Life, as a good gift.  The series culminated here.  If you read it, read it thoughtfully.  The whole idea challenged me, but I didn't delve deeply into myself to think through my story and what I ('I' being my heart/soul/mind) would say to my body.

2. I had been thinking about art, and visual art in particular.  Drawing and painting and the like are things towards which I have never gravitated as an artist because they are things in which I have no natural talent.  But as I've been mulling about making space to be creative, I've wondered what dabbling in colours would do in me.  It's preposterous to think of, really, because my drawing skills would get me kicked out of any respectable kindergarten class.

3. I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.  (Galatians 2:20 ESV)

So with these fragments in tow, I was part of a creative worship night with some dear women last week, and it was a long, deep breath of sweet air.  We gathered to encourage each other and to venture into (potentially) new territories of creativity in worshipping God with more of ourselves.  It was simultaneously safe and challenging, and I immediately gravitated towards the area prepared for painting -- it felt ridiculous and right.  I started to choose my colours, and I knew that somehow I would be drawing myself, my body, and telling my story.  My strokes were neither clear nor expert but they were mine, and the blues, greens and browns began to form a tree.

There were roots: strong, hidden roots.  There were dark patches, like the times I disapprove(d) of my skin or my curves.  There were indistinct, dusky patches coloured by years of discharing my angst, unordered and un-analyzed, while facing my body in front of the mirror.  There were shades of blue, times when I knew I was created in love but didn't glorify my Maker by taking care of the earthly vessel He gave me.  There was also beauty.  The more I kept painting, the more I kept adding shades of blues and greens and browns.  However, the painting kept growing darker (It turns out that layering lots of paint can get pretty dark.  Who knew).  I realized that, literally and figuratively, the painting needed to become brighter because it was not honest.  So I hesitantly reached for some red.  I am not a person who gravitates towards reds, ever, and I was afraid of irreversibly uglifying my canvas.  But I had nothing to lose, and in truth I knew that some of my personal brightness, some of the way I've come to see myself differently, comes from one of Orion's names for me: Cherry Tree.  Through his love through the years, I have come to know some of my own beauty that I'd never known before.  His love for me is such a key part of my story that I knew I needed to bring it into this painting (I realize that I was likely trying to do to much in this experiment, bringing too many ideas and too much meaning to the table.  I can get kind of serious like that).

So I started to add wisps of red and it really made a difference.  The colours were made more beautiful in their contrast.  But Galatians 2:20 was still ringing inside of me.  Even more hesitantly than I had reached for the red, I reached for the bag of paints labelled 'iridescent.'  I found gold and started to add streaks of gold to the trunk, cautiously but with quiet determination.  It was transformational.

When I felt I was done, I made my way over to The Chair and sat down.  A couple of women came and prayed for me (that's what The Chair was for), and Susan told me that the picture she received while praying for me was a picture of God filling me with liquid gold.  Gold was being poured into me, all the way down to my toes, and it was filling me up.  The gold was His worth: Christ was filling me with the beauty of His worth.

With wet cheeks, I invited Susan to look at my painting and told her my story, because she had no idea of what I'd been wading through for the past hour.  We laughed and marvelled at God's kindness, His loving kindness that fills us with His worth and makes beautiful things out of dust.

This blog post is a little rough around the edges, and a lot more personal than I feel capable of sharing in a public sort of way, but I needed to write it.  What I am trying, so inadequately, to say, is that God makes beautiful things and it is all grace.